


Rosetta Stone

by kelex



Category: Smallville
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-26
Updated: 2013-07-26
Packaged: 2017-12-21 11:04:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/899547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kelex/pseuds/kelex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"We all have our windmills, Clark.  I just have to know I'm right."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rosetta Stone

Virgil Swann had never yet ceased to be amazed by his mind's prowess. He wondered, sometimes, if his physical disability had been the catalyst for his mind to develop a thirst for knowledge and exercise.

And that's how this had all started, an exercise for his mind. An unintelligible message, coming in from another world. Proof of his theories, that life existed, and then... the message itself. It took him years to decrpyt, working endlessly until he found the key. The Rosetta stone, the guide to the language. The key was in the message, easy enough to figure out if you know higher-vector algorithms and the principles of non-repetitive linear advancement, which of course he did. 

_This is Kal-El of Krypton. Our infant son, our last hope... Please protect him and deliver him from evil. We will be with you, Kal-El, for all the days of your life._

Another puzzle that he couldn't help solving. He had searched, looked through every paper he could, had followed the meteor shower the day that it happened. Over and over again, his mind backtracked through Smallville, going through page after page of newspaper reports, reading and listening and searching for a mention of a child found wandering alone after the shower.

No. All the coverage had been a little girl in a princess costume and it had angered him, but he didn't hold onto the anger. He channeled it into work, and had soon compiled the greatest body of information he possibly could have on Krypton, the planet where the message and the hypothetical child had come from.

Swannstar satellites dotted the skies, feeding his computers and his telescopes constant streams of galactic information. Coordinates, star positions, chunks of space debris, and he spent his days poring over the data, formulating and plotting and studying and chasing theories until one day, in the Smallville newspaper, he found it.

Burned onto the side of a barn, one of the first symbols he'd translated from the message. 

Hope.

Without hesitation, Virgil found the owner of the barn, the Kent family. A little research into their family showed that they'd adopted a little boy named Clark almost thirteen years ago. He could hardly believe his luck, and he scoured every Smallville website he could find until he stumbled on the high school newspaper, where Clark Kent was a staff writer and his email was listed on the page. 

Virgil flooded Clark's Torch email box with emails. One after the other, he waited for Clark--or did he go by Kal-El?--to log on and respond to him. Finally, when Clark did, he pounced. 

His instant messenger had long since been reprogrammed to accept English and non-English symbols alike. As he dictated the message into the voice program, he couldn't help but be enthralled by the way the symbols flowed together, each part forming a word, each word a part of the last step he had to take to know that everything he had done in his life was validated. 

When Clark responded, acknowledging the message and the understanding of the language, Virgil was elated beyond belief. He mailed a package to Clark, a card printed on white cardstock, simple and plain with the symbol and translation of it, his address beneath it in invitation. He had it delivered by courier, with the instructions that it was to be delivered to Clark and nobody but. 

Several days past, during which he _knew_ Clark was investigating him because his computer, programmed to inform him of any hits regarding him, showed several searches on him when there had been none for weeks. 

Then, finally, Clark walked into his planetarium. Tall, dark haired and broad shouldered, bright eyed and painfully _young_. He could tell by the unsureness in Clark's movements that he knew nothing, showed up here with great expectations, and immediately, he _knew_ that he'd be seeing Clark again. 

Kal-El would need a guide, someone who knew of his world. And since Virgil had been the one to receive the message, he felt as though he owed it to Kal-El's world, to the people who sent the message to this painfully backwards world, to make sure that he knew where he came from and what he did.

"What am I doing here?" echoed through the empty storeroom, and Virgil steered his wheelchair around the corner of his desk. 

"Looking for answers, I hope."

The End


End file.
